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NEGRO SLAVERY IN WISCONSIN.' 



BY JOHN NELSON DAVIDSON, A. M. 

'"It is a free country. No slavery can be admitted here." 
Thus, in 18:33, Rev. David Lowrey wrote of what was soon 
to be Wisconsin." And at the centennial celebration of the 
settlement of Marietta, Ohio, April 7, 1888, Senator George 
F. Hoar, speaking of the old Northwest Territory and the 
states that have succeeded it, used these words: "Here 
was the first human government under which absolute 
civil and religious liberty has always prevailed. Here no 
witch was ever hanged or burned. No heretic was ever 
molested. Here no slave was ever born or dwelt. When 
older states or nations, where the chains of human bond- 
age have been broken, shall utter the proud boast, 'With 
a great price I obtained this freedom!' each sister state of 
this imperial group, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and 
Wisconsin, may lift up her queenly head with the yet 
prouder answer, 'But I was free born!'" 

We could wish that these statements were entirely ac- 
curate. It is true that the witchcraft delusion, that has 
slain its hundreds of thousands of victims in Germany, 
France, Britain, and in twenty or more even in our own 
land, found none here.' But negroes were actually held as 
slaves in Indiana, Illinois and even in Wisconsin. Doubt- 
less there were some also in Ohio. 

■Address delivered before the State Historical Society of Wisconsin at its fortieth annual 
meeting December 8, 1892. 

-See Wis. Hist' Colls., xii., p. 405, for a sketch of David Lowrey, D. D., then in charge of 
the Winnebago school at Prairie du Chien.— R. G. Thwaitks. 

■'In 1779 there was a witchcraft panic among the French Creoles at Cahokia, III. Two 
negro slaves were condemned to be hanged, and another to be burned alive while chained 
to a post, on the charge of practising sorcery; there is, however, no evidence that the sen- 
tence was carried out.— R. G. T. 



/r4-4^6 



84 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

It is from the lips of living witnesses that I have part of 
the story of negro slavery in Wisconsin. One of these is 
more than a witness; he is doubtless the only living man 
who held slaves in Wisconsin. It is to his credit that he 
became also their emancipator. I speak of George Wallace 
Jones, now of Dubuque, Iowa, the last delegate in congress 
from Michigan Territory. To write in full the biography of 
•General Jones — he was brigadier in the Territorial militia 
under Governor Dodge — would be to write a great part of 
the early history of southwestern Wisconsin. 

One of the landmarks in that part of the state is Sinsin- 
awa Mound, almost on the dividing line between Wisconsin 
and Illinois, and about six miles east of Dubuque, Iowa. 
In 1827 Mr. Jones, by advice of his physician, left his 
Missouri home and came northward. In March of that 
year he made " claim," after the custom of those times, to a 
piece of land. This he afterwards secured by title from the 
United States government, being the first man to prove up 
preemption rights in the Mineral Point land- office, — opened 
about 1&3G,— and thus the first to enter therein a quarter- 
section of land. 

The noble " mound" already named stands upon the tract 
of land to which Mr. Jones made this early claim. Here 
he established a trading- post, and here he held about a 
" dozen or fifteen " slaves, brought from Missouri. ' At some 
date, not remembered by General Jones, now an octoge- 
narian, one of his negro men whom he calls Sam brought 
suit against him for wages. The case was tried before 
Judge Dunn, so well known in our early history. Accord- 
ing to General Jones's recollection the judge charged the 
jury that the negro's legal status was determined by the 
statute of the state whence he had been brought, and that 

In 18W Col. James Johnson, of Kentucky, took a leadiniae lease from the national 
government, and under stronsr military protection encamped with a party of negro slaves 
-where Galfna now stands, and commenced operations on the most extensive -lale yet 
known in the lead country. Several of the miners who foUoived on his heels into the Ga- 
lena (or " Fever River " district) had slaves. In 1826, a careful annalist record* that across 
the Mississippi river in Missouri there were fully two thousand men employed in lead-min- 
•ing, " miners, teamsters and laborers of every kind (including slaves)." Some of these were 
Partners who, with their slaves, spent only their spare time in the mines.— R. G. T. 



\ 



NEGRO SLAVERY IN WISCONSIN. 85, 

consequently he could not be party to a suit. Such a rul- 
ing does not seem consistent with the fact that a jury was 
summoned. It may be that the old gentleman's memory is 
at fault; and the suggestion of an eminent member of the 
Milwaukee bar has led to the thought that perhaps the 
judge held that General Jones's financial obligation to 
the negro was determined by the relation which in lieu of 
a contract had existed between them in the state whence 
they both came. Widely different as are these possible 
rulings of the court, the result to the unfortunate negro, as 
far as the immediate object of his suit was concerned, was 
practically the same. To adopt the language of a certain 
real or supposed country newspaper, " He succeeded in 
getting nothing." Probably he was already practically 
free; and about 1842 General Jones emancipated all whom 
he had held in slavery. Strictly speaking, this action on 
his part was but the recognition of a right which he knew 
they already possessed. Practically, it was very likely the 
breaking-up of an establishment which had been held to- 
gether by the bonds of kindliness and mutual good will. 

General Jones, who speaks with great frankness of his 
own holding of slaves in Wisconsin, tells us also of like 
action on the part of Governor Dodge. Yet the cases are 
Qot precisely alike, for Dodge, before removing to Wiscon- 
sin, called together his negroes and promised freedom after 
five years' service to such of them as would go with him to 
his proposed new home. This he established only .a few 
miles from the site whereon was afterwards built the little 
city of Dodgeville. He more than fulfilled his promise, for 
at the appointed time he not only set his negroes free, but 
also gave each man forty acres of land and a yoke of 
oxen. 

Another of the living witnesses to the fact of slavery in 
Wisconsin is ex-Judge Joseph Trotter Mills, of Lancaster. 
Among his early cases was one brought to compel a so- 
called master to set free a colored man held in Grant county 
as a slave. The deed of manumission executed on this 
occasion is, the honored judge thinks, the only document 
of the kind on record in our state. In 1834, when he became 



86 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

one of the founders of the Cumberland Presbyterian (now 
the Congregational) church of Prairie du Chien, young 
Mills protested against the sin of slavery, for one of the 
brotherhood, Andrew Cochrane, held slaves in Missouri. 
Of this church, David Lowrey was the first pastor. 

But there was one case of the actual holding of a slave 
at Prairie du Chien itself. Tt was that of a mulatto named 
Day. He attracted the attention of the late Rev. Alfred 
Brunson, who, thinking that Day had a mind to be useful in 
pastoral or mission service, raised money and secured the 
mulatto's freedom. But he proved either to be unfit for the 
service desired of him, or unwilling to enter into it, and 
the investment from the missionary point of view proved 
to be a total loss. This event seems to have been a matter 
of intense mortification to Dr. Brunson and of keen delight 
to his enemies. 

But Platteville has the unpleasant distinction of being 
the only place in Wisconsin where slaves were not only act- 
ually held, but whence they were also returned to slave soil 
and to legal bondage. The latter case was that of two girls 
held by the wife of Rev. James Mitchell, a minister of the 
Methodist Episcopal church. When it became unsafe to 
try to keep them as slaves any longer in Wisconsin, they 
were taken to St. Louis. Intense feeling was aroused in 
Platteville by this shameful and illegal deed. From the ec- 
clesiastical point of view, Wisconsin was then embraced 
within the limits of the Rock River conference. Before this 
body, accordingly, Mr. Mitchell was tried for kidnaping. He 
pleaded that he was not the owner of the slaves. Whether 
on this ground or not I cannot say, but by a small majority 
he secured acquittal. 

Green Bay has place in o,ur narrative, for the venerable 
Jeremiah Porter, D. D., of Beloit, remembers distinctly a 
mulatto girl who was held there as a slave. In later 
years Dr. Porter met her as a free woman. According to 
his wish, no name save his own is given in connection 
with this case. 

John Myers, of Platteville, who gave me most of the 



NEGRO SLAVERY IN WISCONSIN. 87 

facts 1 have mentioned concerning the two slave girls of 
that place, tells of another case in which it is best that no 
names be given; for the relation was probably that of vol- 
untary rather than of enforced servitude. Yet Mr. Myers 
thinks that when the census of 1840 was taken, the person 
was reported as a slave. 

With the single exception known to Dr. Porter, these 
slaves were all brought to Wisconsin in the first of the two 
great currents of early immigration that came hither. This 
was from the south, the older west, — Kentucky and Tennes- 
see were then considered to be western rather than south- 
ern states, — and from Missouri. It was by way of the 
Mississippi that most of these emigrants reached Wiscon- 
sin. That a few of them brought slaves is not a matter of 
surprise. Many, like Rev. David Lowrey, Judge Mills, and 
a personal friend of the writer, the late Benjamin Kil- 
bourn, of Jamestown, — a type of men less known but not 
less earnest, — came with an abhorrence of human bondage. 
Samuel Mitchell, first pastor of the Methodist Episcopal 
church of Platteville, who, though a native of Virginia, 
emancipated his slaves on becoming a Christian, certainly 
put to shame his less worthy son already named. Governor 
Dodge was another man who did better than his son. Both 
were in the United States senate, the former from Wiscon- 
sin, the latter from Iowa, when the Wilmot proviso came 
before that body. The son, Augustus 0. Dodge, voted 
against it; the father in its favor. 

The second of the two great streams of early immigration 
hither came by way of the Great Lakes, and for the most 
part from New England and New York. It was distinct- 
ively anti- slavery in sentiment. Among the men who formed 
part of this movement were many who in later years re- 
sisted manfully the abominable fugitive slave law. But 
against human slavery itself, and its more immediate ef- 
fects, the abolitionists who came hither from the south 
made, here and elsewhere, an earlier fight, and against 
greater odds won victory. 



54 W 



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